BigAir making wireless waves

Jason Ashton doesn’t spend a cent with Telstra, which suits him just fine. Now the chief executive of listed wireless broadband provider
BigAir
, Ashton cut his business teeth as the co-founder of one of Australia’s first internet service providers (ISPs), Magna Data, back in 1993. He helped
Fairfax Media
build The Sydney Morning Herald’s first website and hosted it from his office.

That business was sold to cabling company Davnet for $16 million in 1999 and Ashton stayed on for two years before leaving to start BigAir in partnership with former PowerTel executive Patrick Choi.

“We’d had various experiences, but one of the challenges we always found was that we wound up buying things from Telstra," Ashton recalls. “We wanted to start something where we could completely bypass them and to this day we do not spend a dollar with Telstra. We are very happy about that because you don’t like spending money with your biggest competitor."

As with Magna Data, BigAir has moved away from a consumer focus to carve a niche for itself in the business market and posted record earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $1.4 million for the first half of this financial year.

The priority this year is to continue expanding its coverage and increase the capacity of its partner model, which has seen BigAir concentrate on wholesaling its services to telecommunications carriers, internet service providers and systems integrators since the start of last year.

Today it operates in each of the country’s six biggest cities but plans to works its way down the list until it is represented in all of the top 20 within the next two years.

“The smaller cities like Newcastle and Wollongong don’t take so long," Ashton says. “Then there’s the Central Coast, the Sunshine Coast; each is a smaller proposition than Sydney or Melbourne."

BigAir’s partners sell its fixed-wireless services in conjunction with fixed-line services from other operators to create networks for small and medium businesses [SMBs] and corporate customers. That allows Ashton and his team to focus on building the network, improving speeds and quality of service.

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Disaster recovery has been a growing area of business for BigAir as organisations protect themselves against network failure by adding a wireless link to their existing fibre or copper fixed-line services.

BigAir has a broad variety of customers but has a fair concentration in education, particularly with private and independent schools, but also in university shared accommodation.

The only other way to deliver the amount of bandwidth needed by these sites would be by using fibre links, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build before they are even switched on.

“We can install big capacity wireless links for a fraction of that cost and if the client needs to move it in six months time we just pick up our equipment and redeploy it," Ashton says. “A telco could not be so flexible about a fibre link because they would not have recouped their investment in building the network."

BigAir also provides connections to the Sydney Convention Centre for events like CeBIT and the Motor Show as well as major hotels.

Like everybody else in the internet business, Ashton is watching the development of a national broadband network with great interest. But far from feeling threatened by the NBN, he thinks it will help differentiate BigAir as a supplementary service.

“The NBN will probably mean that most of the fixed operators will use it and there will be less infrastructure options," Ashton says. “We will be one of the truly independent infrastructure providers that can offer a back-up alternative with the same sort of capabilities."

BigAir will also benefit from the NBN tackling regional black spots because it will link BigAir with the core network, and give it access to areas it has been unable to service without dealing with Telstra.

Ashton says getting the backhaul sorted out will make broadband much more competitive in regional and rural Australia. Backhaul is the link between the core of the network and the smaller sub-networks.

As a government-run project, he thinks the NBN should leave metropolitan areas until last because they are already very competitive. With four different providers having already rolled out fibre networks on the east coast, BigAir can buy capacity from Sydney to Melbourne for less than it would cost from Sydney to Parramatta.

Flexibility will remain a key sales tool for BigAir when competing with fixed-line competitors. Last year, it secured a contract with an ASX 100 construction company to provide connections for project sites across Queensland, NSW and Victoria.

“They might have a school project where they are doing some construction for 18 months and we drop a link into the site," Ashton says.

“Trying to get it into a shed on a construction site via fibre or copper-based technology would be a disaster. Not only getting it installed but trying to maintain it with trucks rolling out front and the site shed getting picked up and moved around as the project develops."

Short-term services at sporting events and fashion shows have become something of a specialisation for BigAir, which provided internet access for the Australian Open golf tournament when it was played at Royal Sydney Golf Club in 2008.

Earlier this month it provided a link to Bondi Beach for a surfing event featuring 10-time world champion Kelly Slater. The event was webcast and BigAir also provide wireless internet access for people at the event.